Paradise Lust by Brook Wilensky-Lanford Searching for the Garden of Eden

It seems that ever since mankind was kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit, we’ve been trying to get back in. Or at least, we’ve been wondering where the Garden might have been. St. Augustine had a theory, and so did medieval monks, John Calvin, and Christopher Columbus. But when Darwin’s theory of evolution permanently altered our understanding of human origins, shouldn’t the search for a literal Eden have faded away? Not so fast.

In Paradise Lust, Brook Wilensky-Lanford introduces readers to the enduring modern quest to locate the Garden of Eden on Earth. It is an obsession that has consumed Mesopotamian archaeologists, German Baptist ministers, British irrigation engineers, and the first president of Boston University, among many others. These quixotic Eden seekers all started with the same brief Bible verses, but each ended up at a different spot on the globe: Florida, the North Pole, Ohio, China, and, of course, Iraq. Evocative of Tony Horwitz and Sarah Vowell, Wilensky-Lanford writes of these unusual characters and their search with sympathy and wit. Charming, enlightening, and utterly unique, Paradise Lust is a century-spanning history that will take you to places you never imagined.

Brook Wilensky-Lanford grew up on Mount Desert Island, Maine, studied religion at Wesleyan University, and is a graduate of Columbia University's M.F.A. program in nonfiction. She has written for The Huffington Post, Salon, Triple Canopy, Killing the Buddha, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Exquisite Corpse. She lives in the Garden State.

The New York Times

God, he argued, had actually wanted Eve to eat the fruit, and the serpent was not a serpent at all but, rather, “a Communist or a welfare-statist.” Because eating from the Tree of Knowledge empowered Eve, Callaway said she should be blessed “forever for her great decision.”
Wilensky-Lanf...

Publishers Weekly

Wilensky-Lanford, whose essays have appeared in Salon, Killing the Buddha, and The Exquisite Corpse, has carved her literary niche as a "private investigator with an open mind," exploring myth and the human social psyche.

New York Journal of Books

Willcocks tracked a “Garden of Eden of the Semites” to an area farther north, so he labeled his competing countryman’s site the “Garden of Eden of Sumer.” He compromised that the “Sons of God” set their monotheistic, proto-Judaic site in one place.

New York Journal of Books

Willcocks tracked a “Garden of Eden of the Semites” to an area farther north, so he labeled his competing countryman’s site the “Garden of Eden of Sumer.” He compromised that the “Sons of God” set their monotheistic, proto-Judaic site in one place.